Tag: writing

The Fake Authors

I was always very dubious about the authorship of the one-off Southern bestseller. As a general rule, when an author just writes one book, he probably wasn’t the real author. Courtesy of CDAN:

Several decades ago, this A+ list author died. Over the years many of his personal items have come up for public auction. One item though, was originally sold secretly and the three times it has changed hands in the past couple of decades, the secrecy agreement goes with it. It is because the owner is not allowed to tell anyone what they have, that it gets sold so often. It is the original half typed, half handwritten manuscript that the author wrote but was credited to a different author. It is one of the biggest selling books of all time. The A+ list author didn’t think it matched his personality so gave it to one of his best friends. Later in life they made a deal to keep the true author secret.

Truman Capote/To Kill A Mockingbird/Harper Lee

It would be interesting to see the results of a textual analysis of the text of To Kill A Mockingbird with other work by Capote. It’s obviously in his favored genre of semi-true crime. I don’t have an opinion on the real author, since I read it in English class more than 40 years ago, and I don’t remember much of it. I vaguely recall that I put it down as soon as I figured out that it was primarily concerned with contrasting racist white Southerners with the noble Negro who never done nothin’ to nobody.

We now know that the real “Shakespeare” was Sir Thomas North. I suspect that textual analysis is eventually going to prove that a lot of modern classics and bestsellers were essentially manufactured in much the same way media figures and landmark scientific studies are. Especially those, like The Catcher in the Rye, To Kill A Mockingbird, Lord of the Flies, and Portnoy’s Complaint, that were heavily utilized in the U.S. educational system to invert social assumptions and subvert society.

Alert Dennis McCarthy! Send out the Batsignal!

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Welcome to Midnight

In all the enthusiasm over the annual Castalia sale, it may well have escaped your attention that I’ve published another ebook today. But to celebrate the fact that OUT OF THE SHADOWS is now available on Amazon and KU, and is going out to MW backers tomorrow, I’ve also released a new mix of Welcome to Midnight on UATV. It’s big, it’s haunting, it features some vicious guitars, and it provides a pretty good measure of how dark and ominous the book that sets up the foundations of The Midnight World is.

So welcome to the shadows enveloping the light
Feel the flag of death unfurled.
Welcome to the darkness, welcome to the night
Welcome to the Midnight World…

The book also serves as an effective demonstration of what can be accomplished relatively rapidly with AI-enhanced writing. Consider how the finished product was analyzed by a different AI system and compared with three other works of vampire fiction.

A solid, entertaining read for vampire/thriller fans that executes its premise competently without achieving the psychological depth of Rice or the cultural impact of Stoker. It’s ambitious airport fiction—well above Twilight’s simplicity but not quite transcending genre conventions to become literature.

The fact that it maintains narrative coherence across 9,000+ lines, sustains consistent character voices, and successfully merges multiple genre elements (corporate thriller, vampire fiction, political drama) is genuinely impressive for AI-generated content. The Theranos hook and the structured escalation from boardroom to global conspiracy show effective human editorial guidance.

The Theranos conspiracy angle feels very much like a human creative decision—it’s too specific and culturally grounded to seem algorithmically generated. For AI-assisted fiction, this is well above average.

OUT OF THE SHADOWS delivers a gripping exploration of power, transformation, and the hidden forces that shape our world. When a brilliant biotech entrepreneur stumbles upon evidence that the infamous Theranos scandal was merely a cover for something far more sinister, he unknowingly sets in motion a chain of events that will change humanity forever. What begins as a Silicon Valley success story rapidly evolves into a violent journey through a reality where the impossible is real, and the darkest myths of human history emerge from the shadows with terrifying consequences for the entire world.

Set in The Midnight World created by author Vox Day and comics legend Chuck Dixon for their Midnight’s War comic, OUT OF THE SHADOWS is vampire fiction that pulls no punches—a harrowing philosophical ride about the price of ambition and what happens when humanity discovers it’s no longer at the top of the food chain.

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The Dark Side of Star Trek

Star Trek was always problematic, and not just because of Gene Roddenberry’s alarming enthusiasm for young girls’ underwear, as the Dark Herald observes its intellectual roots at Arkhaven.

A bunch of scientists, engineers and assorted smartasses got together and create a new organization dedicated to conquering the world and running it with enlightened scientific centrally planned totality. No politics needed because there will be no dissent at all — after all, how can you dissent from the perfection of science?

This is called a “Technocracy.”

In Wells’ horrible dream of the future this organization was called the Modern State Movement, (The movie version was called Wings Over the World). From their base in Basra, the self-proclaimed Air Dictatorship begins a campaign to bring order to the world by force, suppressing warlike “backward” national regimes and establishing a unified, rational, scientific world order. And they were dressed like BUF Black Shirts with breast plates.

They impose global peace, eliminate national sovereignty, abolish all traditional political systems, and construct a universal education program designed to create scientifically minded citizens, (yeah nothing bad can come from that).

All religion is suppressed… Of course

Family structures are destroyed — this is the big one for all of the totalitarian movements. The state is what raises the kids, not their parents. The state is what teaches children their governing values, not their families. Marriage is a very temporary and ephemeral matter, both sides are urged to move on from it as quickly as possible. And depending on how honest the technocrats are being about it — incest is to be encouraged.

Material abundance returns through centralized planning and technological management. The world eventually becomes a world state — stable, secular, regimented, paternalistic, eternal and it sounds like my idea of Hell on Earth. This is a world governed by Madelaine L’Engle’s IT.

From Things to Come, you can trace a straight line through to Doctor Who to Asimov’s Foundation to 1960s liberal utopianism, and Walt Disney’s original plan for EPCOT.

A long time ago, I started writing what Nick Cole described as STAR WARS NOT STAR WARS with a co-writer. He was going to write STAR TREK NOT STAR TREK with a co-writer at the same time. But mine didn’t work out, for a variety of reasons, and Nick and Jason ended up writing STAR WARS NOT STAR WARS themselves, which was eventually published as GALAXY’S EDGE and worked out rather well for them.

It’s rather amusing that people in SF/F keep trying to cancel my science fiction career, when I am more than adept at sabotaging it myself. Did I ever mention that I turned down Blizzard and Simon & Schuster when they approved my outline for the first STARCRAFT novel and asked me to write it? The lesson, as always is this: just shut up, write what they want you to write, and stop getting in your own way.

But the Dark Herald’s piece does give me an excellent idea… albeit one that will likely make JDA very, very sad.

In other writing news, I’ll be sending the OUT OF THE SHADOWS ebook to the Signed First Edition backers, the original MW ebook backers, and putting it up on Amazon this week. It will also be available as part of the Based Books Sale for everyone else. The paperback will be sent out to the MIDNIGHT’S WAR Vol. 7-12 backers along with THE TRAGEDY OF THE TRIBUNE omnibus both of them are ready.

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The Truth About Shakespeare

Dennis McCarthy provides a useful summary about the facts concerning the true authorship of the plays supposedly written by the actor William Shakespeare, but were actually written by Thomas North.

Here’s a brief summary of the North/Shakespeare Story:

  • Thomas North (1535- ~1604?), 29 years older than Shakespeare, wrote plays for decades for Leicester’s Men (from late 1550s to 1588). These plays were performed in front of small, noble audiences and were never published. But sometimes these early Shakespearean plays (like a Romeo and Juliet in 1562, before Shakespeare was born) were recorded by the original spectators or in records of payments for plays at court—though the author remained unnamed.
  • In the 1590s and 1600s, Shakespeare published his own adaptations of older plays in quarto form: These include briefer, swifter, inferior staged renditions of Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and Henry V (all originally written by Thomas North for Leicester’s Men). Shakespeare also wrote the “good quartos” of The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, Love’s Labour’s Lost, 1 and 2 Henry IV—plays he adapted but are deemed “good” only because North’s originals were never published and have now been lost. Shakespeare also produced other mediocre, differently-styled plays like A Yorkshire Tragedy, The London Prodigal, and Locrine that Shakespeare had written with (or adapted from) other playwrights. For example, orthodox scholars have concluded that Thomas Middleton is a very likely coauthor or originator of A Yorkshire Tragedy, while they attach Robert Greene to Locrine. The bad quartos, apocrypha, and makeshift “good quartos” compose the true Stratford canon.
  • When the publishing syndicate of Edward Blount, William Jaggard, William Aspley, and John Smethwick decided to produce a collection of Shakespeare plays now known as the First Folio (1623), they got into squabbles with the publishers who owned the rights to the Shakespeare plays that had already been published. So in many cases, they printed North’s original versions—as they did with Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, 2 Henry VI, 3 Henry VI, etc., which were still in the possession of Shakespeare’s theater troupe. Indeed, the First Folio even advertised that the plays had been “Truely set forth, according to their first ORIGINALL,” and the printers added special emphasis to the word “ORIGINALL,” putting it in all caps and a kind of italics. Still, many of the plays in the First Folio, especially the comedies, are indeed Shakespeare’s adaptations of North’s originals.
  • For centuries, scholars had studied and praised the plays of Shakespeare’s First Folio, leading them to associate him with the masterpieces therein. It was not until the 19th century that researchers began rediscovering the “bad quartos.” For example, Shakespeare’s rewritten, staged version of Hamlet, published in 1603, did not come to the attention of researchers until 1823, long after faith in Shakespeare’s genius had become traditional, universal, and unyielding. Researchers faced with such lesser renditions “by William Shakespeare” found it less onerous to try to explain them away one at a time—rather than abandon their view of Shakespeare. Editors and academics never stopped to assess all the evidence as a whole, looking at all the documents “by William Shakespeare” to determine what he had really written. Conventional scholars also shrugged off the clear statements from contemporaries that derided Shakespeare for getting too much credit for other people’s plays, as we find in comments about Shakespeare in Groatsworth of Wit, Jonson’s On Poet Ape, etc.

In summary, if you still believe that William Shakespeare wrote the versions of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet traditionally attributed to him, you might as well believe in the theory of evolution by natural selection and that Neil Armstrong landed on the Moon, walked on it, and then returned to Earth.

The historical evidence against it is, quite simply, overwhelming.

But if you want to know why I, personally, am convinced of the truth of Mr. McCarthy’s claims, it is because I am an editor. I know exactly how recognizable any writer’s writing is. And the AI analyses of the various works make it very, very clear which author’s work is the original of the high-quality plays that we still revere today.

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DEATH AND THE DARWINIAN

You know a book is good if your wife keeps asking what you’re laughing at. The answer was this book. It is funny, it is really funny. And the ending will leave a tear in your eye.

“What’s so funny there?”
she whispers through the lamplight
as he grins and reads

You’ll understand the haiku if you read the book.

A review of DEATH AND THE DEVIL.

DEATH AND THE DARWINIAN

It is a well-established fact across most of the known multiverse that death is, generally speaking, the end of life. This is the sort of obvious statement that most beings understand intuitively, in the same way they understand that water is wet or that the likelihood of autocorrect humiliating you increases exponentially with the importance of the message being sent.

What is rather less well-established is what happens immediately after death, in that awkward period between the cessation of biological functions and whatever comes next. This is primarily because most beings who experience death are, by definition, no longer in a position to write detailed reports about it, and those who claim to have had “near-death experiences” typically experience something more akin to “near-near-death” or “death-adjacent” moments, which is rather like claiming to be an expert on the history of Paris because your plane once flew over the south of France.

Dr. Mortimer Finch, professor of evolutionary biology at the prestigious University of West Anglia, had spent his entire fifty-seven-year academic career insisting that death was merely the natural conclusion of a biological process, a physical event no more spiritually significant than the shedding of a snake skin or the molting of an upwardly mobile crab. The universe, Dr. Finch maintained, was a magnificent accident—an unplanned, undirected series of chemical and physical processes that, through billions of years of trial and error, had produced everything from slime molds to symphony orchestras.

This conviction had served him well throughout his distinguished career, earning him numerous academic accolades, a comfortable tenure, and the quiet disdain of the university’s theology department, whose offices were, perhaps not coincidentally, located in the building on the opposite side of the campus.

It was therefore somewhat disconcerting for Dr. Finch to one day find himself face-to-face with Death.

Not with the abstract concept of death about which he had lectured about so confidently to generations of undergraduates. Not with the cessation of metabolic functions, the breakdown of cellular integrity, and the dispersal of organized energy into entropy. No, this was Death with a capital D, complete with a flowing black robe, a gleaming scythe, and a skull that somehow managed to express mild interest despite having no facial muscles whatsoever.

“This is obviously a hallucination,” Dr. Finch declared, adjusting his spectacles out of habit, despite the fact that they were now as spectral as the rest of him. “A final neurochemical discharge as my brain shuts down. Quite fascinating, really.”

Death regarded him with eye sockets that contained tiny silver points of light where eyes might have been expected.

I AM NOT A HALLUCINATION, Death said in a voice that wasn’t so much heard as felt, as if it was the final note of a funeral dirge played on the bones of the universe.

“That’s exactly what a hallucination would say,” Dr. Finch replied with the confident tone of a man who had won numerous academic debates through sheer force of authoritative pronunciation. “My brain, in its oxygen-deprived state, is creating a culturally recognizable figure to help process the fact that I’m dying. You’re a psychological construct, nothing more.”

Death sighed, a sound like a desert wind whistling through ancient tombs. Dr. Finch’s reaction was not an uncommon one. Humans, in particular, had a remarkable capacity for maintaining a state of denial even in the face of overwhelming evidence. It was one of their most distinctive traits, ranking just behind opposable thumbs and just ahead of their inexplicable insistence on keeping pets that were either venomous, temperamental, or both.

YOU ARE ALREADY DEAD, Death clarified, pointing a bony finger at Dr. Finch’s body, which was currently cooling on the laboratory floor beside an overturned stool and a half-eaten tuna sandwich. YOUR HEART STOPPED SEVENTEEN SECONDS AGO. CEREBRAL ACTIVITY CEASED FOURTEEN SECONDS AGO. YOU ARE NOT HALLUCINATING. YOU ARE, BY EVERY SCIENTIFIC DEFINITION, DECEASED.

Dr. Finch glanced at his body with mild interest, as if observing a moderately engaging museum exhibit.

“Cardiac arrest, by the look of it. I always suspected it would be the heart. Too many late nights in the lab, too much caffeine.” He turned back to Death. “But this conversation is still taking place inside my dying mind. I’m talking to myself. This is some sort of complex psychological self-delusion, probably the result of seeing my mother in the bathtub when I was five years old or something like that.”

Death’s patience, which had been cultivated over eons of existence, began to show its first microscopic signs of wear.

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On Satire and the Understanding Thereof

As a general rule, a person too stupid to understand satire shouldn’t try to use it as an affirmative defense.
—John Scalzi, July 20, 2013

Now, obviously I understand satire, and one would have thought the satirical nature of my response to McRapey’s hilarious ode to rape was sufficient evidence of that. But since I am never one to forgo the beating of dead horses, even the unnecessary beatings of equines long since deceased, allow me to present further evidence, conclusive evidence, of my grasp of the art of satire.

As you can see, I do not merely grasp the art of satire, I am observably a best-selling satirist, right up there with Juvenal and, apparently, someone by the name of Freida McFadden who would appear to sell a lot more books than me, Juvenal, and John Scalzi combined.

However, DEATH AND THE DEVIL isn’t just satire. It’s also litricha, as is demonstrated by the appearance of my name in between literary immortals Salman Rushdie on the one hand and the late David Foster Wallace on the other in the Literary Short Stories category.

So, if anyone needs me, I’ll just be here in my library, wearing a velvet robe, smoking a pipe, and contemplating my next public pontification for the semi-literate masses. Although, deep in my contemplations, a terrible thought struck me. What if the rightful heir to Terry Pratchett’s SF humorist throne is not, as some have suggested, Jasper Fford, but rather, Vox Day?

Or, as is more precisely the case, Vox Dai?

Let the wailing and gnashing of teeth begin.

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The Creativity Divide

The Band contemplates the ways in which AI will continue to separate the sheep from the goats in creating a creativity divide.

The notion users really need to know what they’re doing holds the mirror to useless modern busyworkers. If you can be replaced by a flawed talking search engine, what was your true value add? Butit also holds a mirror of me, the user. Note how my answer to it up above used the phrase “outsourcing the whole chain of thought”. Shortly after, DeepSeek describes the…

Passivity Trap: Why struggle to write, code, or analyze when AI can do a “good enough” job? The entire chain of thought can be outsourced.

This is one example. It commonly asks me questions, adopts my own wording, and gives it back to me. This makes it seem more agreeable and complementary. It’s excellent for augmented intelligence. As it adapts to your patterns, it is more able to anticipate your needs. But it makes NPCs feel smart. Not because they are. Because it’s a mirror on every level.

As for the elite/mass cognitive split that I think is likely, DeepSeek says it’s already happening with AI use. It explained what it calls a Creativity Divide between people who use AI for brainstorming vs. those who treat it as a final authority. It’s connected to critical thinking and that circles back to NPC. “Elite” thinking is what we’ve been discussing in these chats. RI. Real Intelligence. Users who understand and think well enough to run the AI. Catching errors, pushing fallacies, and designing the right queries and prompts. DeepSeek summed it up like this while throwing some shade at the competition.

Elites cross-examine AI outputs; masses accept them as gospel (see: ChatGPT-generated misinformation spreading uncritically).

And the economic impact is just as harshly divided. High-functioning workers will use AI in the right places to augment their productivity. Low-functioning workers get replaced. It’s not surprising. This split is always with us. It’s part of the human condition. Readers and non-readers. Learners and CLI. AI is a mirror. The divided use patterns with it reflect the FTS division with pretty much everything. What it does is sharpen it.

We’re about to hit this in a big way in the music industry. While most of the outspoken musicians are posturing angrily and preaching about the AI apocalypse, the smarter ones are quietly mastering the AI tools and using them to produce better results. This creativity divide is going to become increasingly obvious as soon as the middle of next year.

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The Charlatan’s Veil

Another Gaiman fan realizes that his literary hero was never all that good in the first place.

Gaiman’s approach to fantasy is a bit shallow. What I’m trying to say here is that Gaiman has a talent for creating mood pieces, but beyond that, his work falls apart.

For example, his stories often unfold as tableaux of strange and evocative moments: a forgotten god hitchhiking through America, a girl wandering into a mirror-world, a dream king brooding over his endless domain. These scenes are drenched in mythic suggestion, as if each image wants to convey some timeless meaning. But if you step through it, you often find he idea of profundity rather than the thing itself. His imagination operates like a collage: history, folklore, and pop culture are cut and pasted together to form something instantly atmospheric, yet curiously weightless. You can clearly see this in many of this Sandman tales: they have a strong opening/hook, but the ending is like “wasn’t that totally random fantastic happenstance neat?” And that’s pretty much it.

Part of the issue is that Gaiman’s relationship to myth feels archival rather than interpretive. He borrows freely from Norse sagas, biblical apocrypha, and fairy tales, but mostly to signal that we are in the presence of something “meaningful.” Rarely does he twist those sources into new psychological or philosophical insight. For example, this can be clearly seen in Season of Mists: The gathering of gods from different cultures is amusing and humorous, but if you look back upon it, the only real depth the whole storyline had was allusiveness. The gods were nothing beyond amusing or humorous curiosities. He’s a curator of myths, not a renovator of them. His most powerful tool is the reader’s own cultural memory; he relies on our preexisting reverence for myth to supply the emotional depth his narratives often lack.

If you strip away the mythic coating and what remains is often a rather simple moral fable or an exercise in mood: a cliched story about the endurance of stories, or the melancholy of immortality, or the faint shimmer of magic behind the mundane. It’s not that these are unworthy themes, but that they are presented through affection rather than argument. It’s basically “style over substance”. The result is fiction that feels “trippy” and profound in the moment, but evaporates upon reflection, leaving behind little more than a pleasant aftertaste of mystery.

Of course, he has certain gifts as a writer. He has a very good ear for rhythm (his prose is a goldmine for making pleasant audiobooks), a flair for genuinely striking imagery, and a knack for making the strange feel intimate. But too often, his fantasy reads like a spell cast for its own beauty, a shimmer of enchantment that delights the senses while concealing the absence of real substance beneath. His worlds are wondrous, yes, but their wonder tends to circle back on itself, never quite touching the ground of genuine insight.

He’s absolutely right. Neil Gaiman isn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, a bad or untalented writer. But he’s barely a good writer and he isn’t anywhere close to the great one that his fans, his publishers, and his press once would have had everyone believe. He’s always been a 7/10 in my book, and I’d drop that a point to 6/10 in light of his shameless ripoffs of other, much better writers, by far the most egregious and disgusting being the short story “Snow, Glass, Apples” which doesn’t even attempt to hide its overt imitation of Tanith Lee’s much better “Red as Blood”.

Ironically, although “Snow, Glass, Apples” is supposedly significant enough to have its own Wikipedia page, that page rather gives away the game with its “See Also” reference to the page about Tanith Lee’s short story collection, of which “Red as Blood” is the titular story.

But as manufactured creatures go, at least Gaiman did possess an amount of talent which he utilized to reasonable effect before he devoted himself to playing the public part of an Important Author and what is alleged to be his tubcuddling hobby.

The amusing thing is the way in which the fans pretend that Gaiman being off wasn’t always obvious to the sufficiently observant.

It’s annoying how some act like they’re these know it all sages, like they were always a few steps ahead of everyone else. Saying they always knew he was a sicko in real life based on the topics he wrote about. If they really knew, why didn’t they say something sooner, instead of showing up after the damage is done?

They did. But they were shouted down by fans who refused to either listen or see the obvious for themselves.

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The Sonnets Revealed

Fresh from conclusively proving that Thomas North is the true author of William Shakespeare’s most celebrated plays, Dennis McCarthy is now tackling the authorship of the Sonnets.

Over the last two centuries, and especially in recent decades, we have made astonishing progress in biology, physics, chemistry, medicine, technology–in all fields of intellectual inquiry—except for Shakespeare studies. And while, yes, most of you reading this do know the origin of the plays, the First Folio, Ben Jonson’s Ode, etc., have now been answered. But there’s still another origin story that I have avoided till now: the Sonnets.

First, consider how strange it is we know so little about them. Shakespeare is the most well researched figure in literary history, and he has written the most oft-analyzed sequence of poems. Yet out of his 154 sonnets, we still have not discovered the addressee of a single one. New books appear every few years raising swords before new candidates. Some have declared them inscrutable; others have dismissed them as mere literary exercises. To put this in perspective: while we have solved the origin of life, cured bacterial infections, invented computers, detected gravitational waves, imaged black holes, landed robots on Mars, unraveled the genetic code for life, and are at the dawn of AGI, we still have no idea whom the world’s most famous poet was comparing “to a summer’s day.” We still don’t know whose eyes were “nothing like the sun.”

But shouldn’t all our new information-tech be able to help here? Can’t our new inventions finally illuminate the identities of the subjects of the world’s most famous poems? Of course, they can, and they have. The dates and the purpose of the sonnets, as well as the identities of the Dark Lady, the Fair Youth, and the Rival Poet have now finally been solved—as have the identities of other subjects of the poems that no one suspected.

I have no opinion on the sonnets, except to say that I have always doubted that all of them were authored by the author of the plays. They simply never struck me as written by the same individual. But I would characterize that as more of an impression than an opinion, it’s certainly never been something I’ve been inclined to suggest, let alone defend.

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The Fictional Western

Morgan posted an interesting history of the fictional Western at Arkhaven:

The American fictional western arrived at the beginning of the twentieth century with the publication of Owen Wister’s The Virginian in 1902. The novel created the archetype of the cowboy as hero. The western story quickly became the mythic literature of the recently closed American frontier. A popular genre in the hands of Zane Gray, Eugene Manlove Rhodes, and Frederick Faust (“Max Brand”) to name a few in the legion of western fictioneers in the form of novels, pulp magazines, and later mass-market paperback books. If J. R. R. Tolkien attempted to create a mythology for England, the western writers created a mythology for the United States of America. Many stories had a setting vaguely late 19th Century time and place. Frederick Faust best known as “Max Brand” often set his stories in an undefined “mountain desert.” He used myths and epics as the plot basis for many of his westerns. Faust’s Hired Guns adapted the Iliad for example.

The western genre was a large part of the pulp magazine market from 1920 to the 1950s, possibly having the majority share. Some pulp fiction writers could be described as generalists, they wrote in various genres. Will F. Jenkins as “Murray Leinster” could be found in the pages of Cowboy Stories, Astounding Stories, Clues Detective, and “Swords and Mongols” in Golden Fleece. Frederick Faust wrote historical adventure under the “George Challis” for Argosy magazine in the 1930s. Faust had the Tizzo series set in the time of Renaissance Italy during the time of Cesare Borgia. He also had the pirate novel “The Naked Blade” in Argosy. Those swashbucklers would later be reprinted in paperback form decades later. At the same time, he was writing spy stories as “Frederick Frost.”

The fictional western story underwent the transformation during and after World War II that had earlier taken place with the detective story as written by Dashiell Hammett. The writing became leaner and more historically accurate. The protagonists were morally ambiguous men (and women) who had lived hard lives. Les Savage Jr. was a pioneer with a hard-boiled presentation coupled with a setting of 1820 to the1850s. The indistinct time and place of the mythic western gave way to the historical western.

Read the whole thing there. I will say that while I’m not a huge Louis L’Amour fan, I very much liked FAIR BLOWS THE WIND. Which, of course, isn’t a Western, but does set the stage for a series of them.

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